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Bloomberg
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A retired US colonel behind a privately financed rocket launch site in the Dominican Republic sees the project as a response to China’s dominance of the space race in Latin America.
Florida-based Launch on Demand is slated to begin building a US$600 million facility in a remote region near the border with Haiti late this year. The project is designed to meet surging demand for the heavy-lift rockets needed to put clusters of satellites into orbit.
It is also an answer to China’s growing presence in the region, said CEO Burton Catledge, a former commander of the US Air Force’s 45th Operations Group, who has overseen space launches at bases in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base.
A Space Exploration Technologies Corp rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Jan. 10 last year.
Photo: Reuters
Beijing has financed and built at least 11 ground stations, satellite tracking facilities and radio telescopes in Latin America, according to a US congressional report. To Washington, the installations that stretch from Argentina to Venezuela represent a looming regional security threat.
“China has been building dual-use space access facilities all over,” Catledge said in an interview. “We want to keep these kind of actors out of the Western Hemisphere — we want to work to counter this.”
Dominican Republic President Luis Abinader has called the project a national priority as he works to diversify the Caribbean nation’s economy beyond tourism and mining — but his government would not be providing subsidies.
“This will be a 100 percent commercial spaceport to support 100 percent commercial rockets,” Catledge said. “We are moving away from government taxpayers paying for everything.”
The global space economy is booming. McKinsey & Co expects the sector to be worth US$1.8 trillion by 2035 — up from about US$630 billion in 2023, as lower launch costs allow smaller companies to embrace satellite technology.
In Latin America, the two main commercial launch sites are the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana and the Alcantara Launch Center in Brazil, but other types of infrastructure abound.
China has made space cooperation one of the pillars of its outreach to Latin America, offering developing nations infrastructure and expertise.
The US House of Representatives Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the US and the Chinese Communist Party has identified almost a dozen China-linked facilities in Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil.
“Beijing uses space infrastructure in Latin America to collect adversary intelligence and strengthen” the Chinese military’s “future warfighting capabilities,” the committee said.
The sites provide “near-continuous global surveillance, supporting counterspace operations, and enabling the terminal guidance required for advanced weapons systems,” it said.
Launch on Demand, founded in 2018, settled on the Dominican Republic due to its political stability and its proximity to the Equator, Catledge said.
The company would build power and water treatment plants to serve the needs of the base and also provide services to the surrounding community in Pedernales, a rural area in southwestern Dominican Republic, he said.
The space base is key to Abinader’s efforts to modernize the economy of one of the poorest and most remote regions of the country. The government is already building an international airport, a cruise-port terminal and more than 12,000 hotel rooms in the area as part of a US$2.2 billion public-private partnership.
In a national address on Feb. 27, Abinader said it had taken three years of negotiations to reach the “historic agreement” with Launch on Demand.
“This will be pioneering infrastructure that opens the doors of the global-space economy for our country,” he said. “Pedernales is not only becoming a tourism and logistics hub, but the symbol of a nation that’s looking toward the future.”
